London musicals tickets

I’ll tell you what’s fetch: Tina Fey’s writing. With the original ‘Mean Girls’ film 20 years old, ‘30 Rock’ having wrapped up over a decade ago and even ‘The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ now a receding memory, it’s easy to forget how funny this woman was at her zenith - if I were to ballpark it I’d say that she accounted for about 75 percent of the joy the average millennial liberal felt in our otherwise-joyless twenties. I will admit that I didn’t see the 2024 ‘Mean Girls’ film, which simultaneously served as a contemporary remake of the cult classic original, and a screen adaptation of the musical adaptation that was first seen in the US in 2017.  But the ‘Mean Girls’ stage musical that finally arrived in London in 2024 is very, very funny. And it’s not because it’s a nostalgic evocation of the film, which follows naive homeschooled teen Cady Heron as she’s thrust into a clique-riddled Illinois high school, with hilarious results. It’s because Fey has straight up rewritten lots of the jokes and she’s done a spectacular job, her characters riffing away merrily on everything from air fryers and Ozempic to the Dali Lama's tongue-sucking incident. There’s an effortless funniness to her acerbic, surreal, pop-culture infused dialogue, a real sense of ‘oh yeah, Tina Fey is a genius isn’t she?’ Unfortunately she isn’t a songwriting genius, and here’s where ‘Mean Girls’ comes unstuck. The songs – with music by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Nell Benjamin – are not funny. Th

'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's loathso

This review is of the original 2021 cast.  From March 11 until June 1 2024 Cara Delevigne will play Sally and Luke Treadway the Emcee.  From June 3 until September 21 Rhea Norwood will play Sally and Layton Williams the Emcee. Come to the cabaret, old chums, and see the stage performance of the year from Jessie Buckley! Gasp at the terrific supporting cast in Rebecca Frecknall’s luxury revival of Kander & Ebb’s musical masterpiece, foremost Omari Douglas’s passionate, tender, little boy lost Clifford! Be wowed by Tom Scutt’s literally transformative design! Wonder at the free schnapps you’re offered on the way in, and nod in polite appreciation at the pre-show entertainment! Also… there’s Eddie Redmayne. Now, I have absolutely nothing against the guy. But the presence of any hugely famous, Oscar-winning star is bound to distort the role of the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club: the Weimar-era Berlin bar in which ‘Cabaret’s tragic heroine Sally Bowles plies her trade. The Emcee is a vital supporting role: his sardonic songs set the mood of the show, and map Germany’s descent into darkness. But it’s in no way the lead role – in fact, the character barely interacts with the actual story. Putting by far the most famous actor in the show in the role would be enormously distracting even if they didn’t do… this. Wearing a series of beautiful, subtly sinister outfits that kind of feel like they’re trying to process every single one of David Bowie’s sartorial choices from ’73 to ’83 (more on

It’s been a year since Nicholas Hytner’s impossibly rousing production of ‘Guys and Dolls’ opened at the Bridge Theatre and made standing up for a three-hour show London’s hottest ticket since the sixteenth century. Now, after 12 months of stomping through Arlene Phillips’s deft choreography across constantly raising and lowering platforms, roughly half of the cast are moving on to pastures new (maybe to just counter the nightly feeling of seasickness) while the rest have found it impossible to drag themselves away from London’s most acclaimed classic stage musical in years. Shipping out are Daniel Mays, who is replaced as the swaggeringly camp Nathan Detroit by Owain Arthur, and Marisha Wallace, who is replaced by Timmika Ramsay as the sensational Miss Adelaide (with Wallace immediately popping up as a ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ contestant). Jonathan Andrew Hume is also a new addition as cheery gambler Nicely-Nicely Johnson, as Cedric Neal bids his farewell. When it comes to core cast, George Ioannides remains in place as the suave Sky Masterson, and Celinde Schoenmaker continues to operatically trill her way through the role of the unsinkable Sarah Brown. Mays was the biggest name, and while the Bangor-born Arthur might not be as instantly recognisable – he’s probably best known for taking over the lead in another Hytner-directed show, ‘One Man, Two Guvnors} – he’s deeply at ease in Detroit’s shoes. Perhaps that’s due to having already filled in for Mays for three months last

What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, ‘Hadestown’ is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely changes – is a New Orleans-style saloon bar, with the cast all dressed like sexy Dustbowl pilgrims. It’s virtually sung through. It is essentially a staged concert, but it’s done with such pulsing musical intensity, physical dynamism

This review is from 2017. See official website for the current cast. Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. ‘Hamilton’ is stupendously good. Yes, it’s kind of a drag that there’s so much hype around it. But there was a lot of hype around penicillin. And that worked out pretty well. If anything – and I’m truly sorry to say this – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the US Treasury, is actually better than the hype suggests. That’s because lost in some of the more waffly discourse around its diverse casting and sociological import is the fact that ‘Hamilton’ is, first and foremost, a ferociously enjoyable show. You probably already know that it’s a hip hop musical, something that’s been tried before with limited success. Here it works brilliantly, because Miranda – who wrote everything – understands what mainstream audiences like about hip hop, what mainstream audiences like about musical theatre, and how to craft a brilliant hybrid. Put simply, it’s big emotions and big melodies from the former, and thrilling, funny, technically virtuosic storytelling from the latter. ‘Alexander Hamilton’, the opening tune, exemplifies everything that’s great about the show. It’s got a relentlessly catchy build and momentum, a crackling, edge-of-seat sense of drama, and is absolutely chockablock with information, as the key players stride on to bring us up to speed with the eventful life that Hamilton – the ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Sc

The last Michael Jackson musical to grace the West End was ‘Thriller – Live’, a revue show that was almost endearingly dumb, consisting as it did of the King of Pop’s greatest hits interspersed with a bunch of ripped men bellowing about his sales figures.  ‘MJ the Musical’ is the real deal, however, an estate-endorsed jukebox show that’s gone down a storm on Broadway. Significantly, it has a book by Lynn Nottage, one of the great American playwrights. Her text addresses aspects of Jackson’s life with a frankness that’s refreshing, if selective. It’s set in 1992, during rehearsals for the ‘Dangerous’ world tour and handily a year before child sex abuse allegations were first levelled against Jackson. ‘MJ’ thus avoids any allusion to said controversy. At the same time, it doesn’t do that thing where it pretends there was nothing unusual about him: there are allusions to everything from Bubbles the chimp to Jackson’s changing skin colour.  For the West End debut of Christopher Wheeldon’s production, ‘present day’ Michael is played by the jaw-droppingly talented original Broadway star Myles Frost. To say he’s a triple threat would be an understatement: in the acting department he’s maybe more of a vague menace, but as a dancer and singer he is extraordinary. Yes sir, he can moonwalk, and slip into all of Jackson’s propulsive dance routines effortlessly. His voice isn’t quite as piercing as Jackson’s, but it’s a fair approximation, and frankly remarkable given what he’s doing with

  ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ is the latest in a seemingly endless post-pandemic string of musical takes on retro movies. ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Dirty Dancing’, ‘Groundhog Day’... if you were born in the ’80s, the West End has decided that by now you're obviously loaded and ready to be milked of your money like a pantomime cow. Only this genuinely funny comedy musical doesn't feel like a cash grab, thanks to its twenty-first-century jokes, perfectly paced book, and silly voices galore.Writer John O’Farrell has worked on ‘Have I Got News For You’ and ‘Spitting Image’, and some of that topical flair can be seen here. Freshly divorced dad Daniel is a comic actor whose voiceover recording seshes ingeniously break out of the American world of the story: he begins with a witty theatre pre-show announcement, then breaks into non-naff impressions of Prince Harry and Boris Johnson. Refreshingly, this production has resisted the temptation to cast a famous funny person in the role, and musical theatre actor Gabriel Vick pulls off both the gags and the songs with impressive aplomb.This story’s serious bits aren't quite as well-handled. O’Farrell struggles a little to make Daniel’s ex-wife Miranda (Laura Tebbutt) more than a boring disciplinarian foil to Daniel's relentless zaniness (here, she gets an improbable fashion career and a 2D hunky love interest). Karey and Wayne Kirkpatricks’ lyrics don't zing with the kind of psychological insights or witty couplets musical theatre fans dream of. But wh

Quite possibly the most aggressively ‘80s artefact in existence, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ is a musical about anthropomorphic roller skating trains that often feels like being forced to watch ten consecutive episodes of some trashy Saturday morning action cartoon. It’s loud. It’s dumb. It barely has characters in any meaningful sense. Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics are kind of anti-Sondheim: it’s a show that makes your brain contract with every second that passes. And yet to complain ‘Starlight Express’ isn’t very clever is like complaining tigers aren’t very good at accountancy. It exists as pure spectacle, and where the original production ran out of steam on the West End way back in 2002 (after a near 18 year stint), this revival from ‘& Juliet’ man Luke Sheppard supercharges it. Staged at what would appear to be enormous expense, the nouveau ‘Starlight Express’ has given Wembley’s hi-tech but hitherto under-utilised Troubadour Wembley Park a real sense of purpose. The production is billed as ‘immersive’, and while I’d argue that’s a stretch, the reconfigured auditorium - designed by Tim Hatley - is extremely cool, with the audience divided into little seating areas that the roller skating actors whoosh around at roughly head height.   Oh yeah, roller skating. Ultimately ‘Starlight Express’ is inseparable from its original conceit, which is that the actors playing the trains skate around the venue. Maybe one day after it’s fallen out of copyright somebody will st

A labour of love that has worked its way slowly to the West End over the five years since it debuted at Southwark Playhouse, at its best Jethro Compton’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an extraordinary thing, a soaring folk opera that overwhelms you with a cascade of song and feeling. It is based on F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, and shares a premise: Benjamin Button (John Dagliesh) is a man inexplicably born at the age of 70, who then begins to age backwards, leading to a strange, exhilarating, sometimes extremely sad sort of life. Writer/director/designer Compton’s interpretation is very different to both Fitzgerald’s and the 2008 David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt. For starters it’s not set in nineteenth century America, but is virtually a love letter to Compton’s native Cornwall, its story spanning much of the twentieth century.  Fitzgerald’s plot is loosely followed, but heavily tinkered with – one of the more significant changes is having Dagliesh’s Benjamin born with a full adult’s mind and vocabulary rather than beginning life as a baby in an old man’s body. More to the point, it has a joy, romance and big-hearted elan that stands in stark contrast to Fitzgerald’s cynicism and the dolefulness of Fincher’s sloggy film. Indeed, despite tragic notes from the off – Benjamin’s mum takes her own life early on – the tone is largely whimsical and upbeat, focussing on the eccentric minutiae of Cornish village life, from oddball shopkeepers to dozy sheep. Gra